53 :: What a crowdsourced map can be: CrowdMap

So in my last post, I expressed some frustration that the github display of geojson was being presented as the solution for crowd-sourcing maps as opposed to a particular solution to a specialized need in web mapping.

I made a beautiful map of bike parking in my neighbourhood in mere minutes at: https://crowdmap.com/map/bikeparkingwindsoressex/ That’s the good news. The troubling thing is the response times from Crowdmap are very slow for some unknown reason. And it’s been a year since the beta was made public and many of the features of the classic Crowdmap haven’t been ported over.

I was wondering if there was some other software suite that moved into this space to make Crowdmap less attractive but I don’t think there has. Adding location awareness to Google Forms still takes some scripting and when I search for geolocation and survey, I get ‘Form Assembly’ as a highly rated hit, but then again, that might be because I searched for them after researching the Local Lotto project last year.

Speaking of which, I know that the Detroit Summer of Code folks build a similar app to help capture place-based information called LocalData. Will investigate further, I think.